Tonight, the fight-fest formerly known as the sport blog gets a facelift, bringing it in line with the rest of the site. From the early hours of Wednesday morning, it will have a bright, clean design, a range of new editorial features to enjoy (not least a more user-friendly archive search) and functions that will take reader interaction to the highest levels.

We hope that glitches will be kept to a minimum - and please shout if you notice any. All your old comments on previous blogs will appear on the new site, so you'll be able to recall your greatest posts down the ages. The blog front will also have a stripped down retro - read basic - look for a few weeks, before it's revamped towards the end of the month.

A few of you (OK, more than a few) have raised concerns about the blog. Here what Meg and Amber had to say:

Meg's response

Right then, let's try and address some of the specific issues you've raised.

First up, speed. Yes. We know. We're working on it, and that's not just the sort of thing you say to get people to shut up - there really is a team of people focused on speeding up the load of the page as a whole, and the comments specifically. We hope we'll have something to share, soon.

Secondly, the javascript thing. Ditto.

Thirdly, we're implementing something within hours (hopefully) which will resolve a bunch of the complaints about the "recent comments" (they're going), and the post and comments appearing on the same page. Part of the reason that was done originally was because the javascript issue (above) would have meant that to put post & all comments on one page would have taken even longer to load, so it made more sense to paginate. As I said, though, we're looking at the speed, javascript & UX issues, and will make improvements as soon as we are able.

Beyond that, the profile pages aren't the start of a "Facebookification" of the site - think of them as contributor pages for commenters, rather than social networking-type profiles.

Lastly (for now), I've seen a lot of people saying "if it ain't broke..." or "why not just leave it alone?" The thing is, the old system we were using was good in a lot of ways, agreed, but was also held together with string and sellotape in places, so was actually far more broken than you might have realised. The fact you may not have noticed is testament to the hard work and diligence of our technology team over years, holding it together, preventing it from crashing and dealing with the frustration of editors who just wanted it to bloody well work.

So the move to the new publishing platform and community tools does actually improve a lot of stuff, though I appreciate that change is always difficult and that the full benefits of the system haven't yet become apparent to everyone. But they will, we hope, as we tweak and improve and refine.

In the meantime, thanks for the feedback.

Amber's response

Hi all - thanks for all of the feedback. We actually are listening! And I'm passing many of your thoughts on to our Technology team.

Meg and I have posted responses to some of these questions here and here.

There'll be a post on Inside Guardian soon about our use of javascript and our future plans.

If you have a Java-enabled phone (most phones made after 2001, but you may need to double check!), we recommend the Opera Mini Browser. We tested it on a few phones here and it works fine. Let us know if it works?